NASA selected some of the best satellite images of 2013 and asked the public to choose a winner by voting. While the image above, of the Canary Islands, showcasing the play of light on water won the award.

The deep drought in the United States that has fueled wildfires, damaged crops, and caused near record-low water levels on the Mississippi River continued through January 2013. Though there has been some relief from a series of winter storms, a pair of satellites operated by NASA show that groundwater supplies continue to be unusually low in many parts of the country.

Scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) say 2012 was the ninth warmest year since 1880, continuing a long-term trend of rising global temperatures. The ten warmest years in the 132-year record have all occurred since 1998. The last year that was cooler than average was 1976.

Some of the surviving pieces of the Chelyabinsk meteor (or bolide) fell to the ground near Chebarkul, Russia. But the explosion also injected hundreds of tons of dust into the stratosphere, allowing a NASA-NOAA satellite to make unprecedented measurements of a thin but cohesive and persistent dust belt.

For more than a decade, scientists have observed “ship tracks” in natural-color satellite imagery of the ocean. These bright, linear trails amidst the cloud layers are created by particles and gases from ships. They are a visible manifestation of pollution from ship exhaust, and scientists can now see that ships have a more subtle, almost invisible, signature as well.

Springtime in the northern hemisphere brings green buds and sprouts to plants on land. It also brings blooms in the seas, where increasing sunlight and nutrient-rich waters promote the growth of phytoplankton. These microscopic, plant-like organisms use chlorophyll to harness energy from the Sun and fuel their own growth. They are the center of the ocean food web, as everything from zooplankton to fish to whales consume phytoplankton.

Snow blanketed most of Great Britain in late January 2013, stretching from London to the northern tip of Scotland. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this natural-color image on January 26, 2013. Only some coastal areas and the southwestern part of the island were free of snow when MODIS took this picture. Skies had mostly cleared by the time MODIS acquired the image, but some clouds lingered in the west, casting shadows onto the snowy surface below.

Though it moves just a tiny fraction of the water carried by the Amazon, Congo, or Niger rivers, the Nile is the world’s longest river. Its main tributaries—the White Nile and the Blue Nile—meet in Khartoum, Sudan, a rain-poor city of nearly 2 million residents that relies on the Nile for irrigation. Well-watered crops line the river banks, and patchworks of croplands (including center-pivot irrigated fields) dot the city’s outskirts.

Serpentine cloud shapes snaked across the eastern Pacific Ocean in mid-January 2013. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this natural-color image on January 15, 2013, showing an area off of the west coast of the United States and Canada.

Visualizations of the Arctic often give the impression that the ice cap is a continuous sheet of stationary, floating ice. In fact, it is a collection of smaller pieces that constantly shift, crack, and grind against one another as they are jostled by winds and ocean currents. Especially during the summer—but even during the height of winter—cracks—or leads—open up between pieces of ice.

The image above shows one of the most inaccessible and rugged sections, a part near the canyon entrance where the river Yarlung Tsangpo passes between two major peaks: the 7,782-meter (25,446-foot) Namcha Barwa and the 7,294-meter (23,462-foot) Gyala Peri.

On most days, relentless rivers of clouds wash over Alaska, obscuring most of the state’s 6,640 miles (10,690 kilometers) of coastline and 586,000 square miles (1,518,000 square kilometers) of land. The south coast of Alaska even has the dubious distinction of being the cloudiest region of the United States, with some locations averaging more than 340 cloudy days per year.

Roughly 300 kilometers (200 miles) east-southeast of Tehran lies Iran’s Dasht-e Kavir, or Great Salt Desert. To the untrained eye, Dasht-e Kavir looks like a place that has been bone-dry since the dawn of time. But to the well-trained eyes of a geologist, this desert tells a tale of wetter times. Tens of millions of years ago, a salt-rich ocean likely occupied this region, surrounding a microcontinent in what is now central Iran.

Air Quality Suffering in China

Residents of Beijing and many other cities in China were warned to stay inside in mid-January 2013 as the nation faced one of the worst periods of air quality in recent history. The Chinese government ordered factories to scale back emissions, while hospitals saw spikes of more than 20 to 30 percent in patients complaining of respiratory issues, according to news reports.

Adorned with lights for night fishing, the boats cluster along invisible borders: the edge of the continental shelf, the nutrient-rich Malvinas Current, and the boundaries of the exclusive economic zones of Argentina and the Falkland Islands. The night fishermen are hunting for Illex argentinus, a species of short-finned squid that forms the second largest squid fishery on the planet.

On September 24, 2013, a major strike-slip earthquake rattled western Pakistan, killing at least 350 people and leaving more than 100,000 homeless. The 7.7 magnitude quake struck the Baluchistan province of northwestern Pakistan. Amidst the destruction, a new island was created offshore in the Paddi Zirr (West Bay) near Gwadar, Pakistan.

On June 19, 2013, NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites captured striking images of smoke billowing from illegal wildfires on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. The smoke blew east toward southern Malaysia and Singapore, and news media reported that thick clouds of haze had descended on Singapore, pushing pollution to record levels.

Remote sensing scientist Clinton Jenkins of North Carolina State University had just such an opportunity earlier this year. In July 2013, he received a tip from colleagues in South America about some possible deforestation in the Loreto region of Peru. Jenkins and colleagues then began combing through recently acquired Landsat images for signs of change.

Between November 9–11, 2013, a large iceberg finally separated from the calving front of Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier. Scientists first detected a rift in the glacier in October 2011 during flights for NASA’s Operation IceBridge. By July 2013, infrared and radar images indicated that the crack had cut completely across the ice shelf to the southwestern edge. New images now show that Iceberg B-31 is finally moving away from the coast, with open water between the iceberg and the edge of Pine Island Glacier.

Big Blast at Sakurajima Volcano, Japan

On August 18, 2013, a large eruption sent ash 20,000 feet (6,000 meters) above Kagoshima Bay, breaking the established pattern. It was possibly the largest eruption ever from the Showa Crater, which formed in 1946.

To paraphrase an old expression: “all roads lead to Liège.” Or at least you could get that impression from this astronaut photograph. The brightly lit core of the Liège urban area appears to lie at the center of a network of roadways—traceable by continuous orange lighting extending out into the rural and relatively dark Belgian countryside. For a sense of scale, the distance from image left to right is approximately 70 kilometers (43 miles). The region to the southeast of Verviers includes agricultural fields and forest; hence, it appears almost uniformly dark at night.

This photograph from the International Space Station (ISS) shows the eastern half of South Georgia Island. At 54 degrees South latitude, snow and ice are permanent everywhere on the island except at altitudes near sea level, where temperatures are higher.

Tristan da Cunha is a shield volcano, a volcanic structure with a low, broad profile and composed of silica-poor lavas (such as basalt). The upper surface of this low base appears dark green in this astronaut photograph. Steeper brown to tan colored slopes mark the central cone of the volcano at the island’s center. The summit crater, Queen Mary’s Peak, sits at an elevation of 2,060 meters (6,760 feet) above sea level. While geologic evidence indicates that eruptions have occurred from the central crater, lavas have also erupted from flank vents along the sides of the volcano and from smaller cinder cones.

The core of old Belgrade—known as Kalemegdan—is located along the right banks of both the Danube and the Sava Rivers (image center). To the west across the Sava, Novi Beograd (New Belgrade) was constructed following World War II. The difference in urban patterns between the older parts of Belgrade and Novi Beograd is striking in this astronaut photograph from the International Space Station. Novi Beograd has an open grid structure formed by large developments and buildings such as the Palace of Serbia—a large federal building constructed during the Yugoslav period, now used to house elements of the Serbian government. By contrast, the older urban fabric of Belgrade is characterized by a denser street grid and numerous smaller structures.

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) photographed these striking views of Pavlof Volcano on May 18, 2013. The oblique perspective from the ISS reveals the three dimensional structure of the ash plume, which is often obscured by the top-down view of most remote sensing satellites.

Astronaut Karen Nyberg shot this photograph on August 5, 2013, while looking west across the Timor Sea from the International Space Station (ISS). (North is to the right in the image.) Note how the smoke near Darwin is blown by southeasterly winds (pushing it to the northwest), while the winds over Melville Island are mostly blowing to the southwest (influenced by the interaction of land and sea breezes and other local effects). Nyberg also shot a photo of the same area while looking straight down.

Thick smoke billows across the landscape in these digital photographs of the western United States. Both photographs were taken by astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) on June 19, 2013.

NASA selected some of the best satellite images of 2013 and asked the public to choose a winner by voting. While the image above, of the Canary Islands, showcasing the play of light on water won the award.